"My Lords, is the Minister aware that, as a preamble to the European Commission’s new deal, it got rid of its excellent chief scientific adviser? She had previously been—and did a very good job as—the chief scientific adviser for Scotland. The Commission did not replace her; it just got rid …..." Lord May of Oxford - View Speech
"Building on the admission that one of the greatest drivers of productivity is research and development, does the Minister agree that we need to do something to promote a more risk-taking culture? In the United States, bankruptcy is almost a condition for going forward in Silicon Valley; in our case, …..." Lord May of Oxford - View Speech
"My Lords, perhaps I may add a footnote to this discussion, which I unfortunately missed because, for the past hour, I have been over at the BBC discussing the floods on “Daily Politics”. I expressed myself uninhibitedly amazed that anyone would ever have thought that it was a good idea …..." Lord May of Oxford - View Speech
"My Lords, I am a member of the Committee on Climate Change and was a member of the committee of both Houses that helped draft the legislation. I want to inject a fact or two into the discussion. The first thing the Committee on Climate Change did was to ask, …..." Lord May of Oxford - View Speech
"My Lords, what the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, has just said was factually incorrect. Climate change temperature has fluctuations. The noble Viscount does not understand the statistics properly; it is basically the same problem he had with his thesis. It fluctuates; it goes up; it flattens a bit. But the …..." Lord May of Oxford - View Speech
"At the risk of being tedious, can I ask for a response to this account of what the IPCC said? This is not printed by some bunch of touchy-feely greenies, but comes from the Economist of a week or so ago. It stated that,
"Does the Minister agree that golden rice is part of a much larger problem? Climate change will exacerbate the difficulties that we already have in supplying food to the growing number of people we will have to deal with. This is best addressed by creating drought-resistant and other kinds of …..." Lord May of Oxford - View Speech
"I turned up explicitly to support the amendment and am reassured that I need not have done. I hope that people will take heed of those remarks and recognise that, in addition to the amendment, somebody should be looking at the idiots who are doing what they are doing...." Lord May of Oxford - View Speech
"My Lords, this cull went ahead against the balance of advice from the scientific community, in particular that such a limited experiment was unlikely to yield much in the way of useful information. Does the Minister agree with me, however, that we have indeed learnt something important? We have learnt …..." Lord May of Oxford - View Speech